50 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
ZUCCHINI
My grandmother cored them
with a serrated knifewith her hands that had come
through the slaughter—So many hours I stared at the blotch
marks on her knuckles,her strong fingers around the
long green gourd—In a glass bowl the stuffing was setting—
chopped lamb, tomato pulp, raw rice, lemon juice,a sand brew of spices—
from the riverbank of her birth—Can holding on to this image
help me make sense of time?office. Though the increase was largely
due to instability in Central America,
the White House blamed Kirstjen Niel-
sen, who had taken over D.H.S. the pre-
vious December, after John Kelly became
Trump’s chief of staff. At a Cabinet meet-
ing, on May 9th, Kelly focussed the dis-
cussion on immigration policy. By then,
the President was calling Nielsen five
times a day to complain. At the meet-
ing, he berated her for half an hour. “How
is this still happening?” Trump demanded.
“Why don’t you have solutions?”
Miller had ideas of his own. In 2013,
during the unaccompanied-minors cri-
sis, an official at ICE had suggested sep-
arating parents and children once they
reached the border, in the hope of de-
terring other families from travelling
north. The White House had dismissed
the proposal as inhumane, but Miller
took it up again. “He was obsessed with
the idea of consequences,” a top D.H.S.
official who worked with Miller at the
time told me. “He’d always say to us,
‘They are breaking the law, and the only
way we’ll change that is if there’s a
consequence.’” The consequences were
specific. The official said, “Miller made
clear to us that, if you start to treat chil-
dren badly enough, you’ll be able to con-
vince other parents to stop trying to
come with theirs.” Miller had already
led a meeting at the White House to
pressure D.O.J. officials to prosecute
border crossers as criminals. (Doing so
was the basis for separating families:
while parents faced criminal charges,
their children were treated as unaccom-
panied minors.) In April, he and Ham-
ilton wrote a Presidential memorandum
directing agencies to end catch and re-
lease; they also composed a letter, signed
by Attorney General Sessions, articulat-
ing a policy, called zero tolerance, for
prosecuting all adults who were arrested
by D.H.S. for illegal entry.
Sessions announced the new policy
at a gathering of law-enforcement offi-
cials in Arizona, saying that if parents
were caught “smuggling” their children
into the country they’d be separated
from them and treated as criminals. The
head of Customs and Border Protec-
tion, Kevin McAleenan, and the head
of ICE, Tom Homan, signed off on zero
tolerance, as did Nielsen. Miller, how-
ever, forced the policy into action be-
fore D.H.S. was ready to implement it.
When border agents began separating
families, the Administration hadn’t yet
made plans to reunite them, a direct re-
sult of “the pressure he brought to bear,”
a top D.H.S. official said. By late June,
more than twenty-five hundred chil-
dren, including a hundred and two under
the age of five, had been separated from
their parents, many of whom didn’t know
where the government had taken them.
In an ICE detention center in El Paso,
groups of separated mothers secretly
exchanged information in the cafeteria
to compile lists of their missing chil-
dren and smuggle out requests to local
lawyers for help.
Hundreds of parents were deported
without their children. From Central
America, they called intermittently func-
tioning U.S. hotlines, set up by the De-
partment of Health and Human Ser-
vices, in an effort to locate them.
Miller forcefully defended family
separation, telling the Times that voters
would support the White House “90-10.”
In fact, the public was outraged, espe-
cially after a recording of small children
crying for their parents at a Texas de-
tention center was leaked to ProPublica.
A Border Patrol agent could be heard
saying derisively, “Here we have an or-chestra.” The policy dominated television
news, and Ivanka and Melania Trump
lobbied the President to end it. Some
inside the Administration thought that
the policy was justified, but that its ex-
ecution had been poor. Several officials
blamed Miller. “How many things have
fallen because of bad messaging?” a
D.H.S. agency head said to me. “Isn’t
Miller supposed to be the master of mes-
saging?” On June 18th, officials at the
White House decided to explain the
Administration’s position to the public
in a press conference. Sarah Huckabee
Sanders, the President’s chief spokes-
person, pressured Nielsen to deliver the
briefing, as a means of shielding the
White House from blame. Nielsen’s ad-
visers were uniformly opposed. “She
would become the face of the policy,”
one of them told me. But, according to
an official who was present for the con-
versation, Sanders told Nielsen, “The
President is getting killed on this, and
it’s your department. How are you not
going to go out there?”
At the press conference, Nielsen al-
ternated between denying that the gov-
ernment had created a policy to sepa-
rate children from their parents and
defending zero tolerance as a necessary